She put up a short struggle, but when he tightened his arms around her, she laid her head on his shoulder and let the tears come.
These weren’t like before, when she had cried on the sofa. Those tears had been more feeling-sorry-for-myself tears. These spoke of deep inner pain, strumming answering vibrations of his own fears within him.
She wiped at her eyes. “Will you please just go back to bed and leave me the hell alone?”
“No.” He rested his cheek on her head and rocked her. “You’re going to let me care about you.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“Why?”
She was quiet for a while. “Because I don’t deserve it.”
He sighed. “That’s bullshit.”
She shook her head, her hair sliding against his chin. “It’s true. I’m a mess.” Her body shook harder, and she sobbed out the words. “I’m useless. I can’t get my life in order. Can’t take care of myself. I’ve failed at everything. It’s all going to fall apart.”
“That’s not true,” he murmured, dropping kisses onto her head. “You’re going through a rough patch. It happens. We’ll get through it.”
“There’s nowe,Dimitri. It’s just me. Alone. And this is it. The end.”
He shifted her so he could look at her face. Her eyes were red and puffy, but even more alarming was the desolation in her expression. She was giving up.
“I’m going to lose my job, either because of my ankle or because I haven’t been able to work enough to make the money to move out on my own. When that happens, I’ll lose my main source of income, and that’ll be it. I can’t stick around LA imposing on people. I’ll have to go back to New York. Back h-home.”
Fresh sobs wracked her frame, and he held on, gritting his teeth against the onslaught. He wanted to make it right. He wanted to fix everything for her. But she wouldn’t let him. So, he just held her and tried to show her without words that he was here for her, however she needed.
After a few minutes, she sniffled and struggled to speak, gasping the words out.
“And what then? What if this gets worse?” She gestured at her ankle, now resting on the edge of the massive tub. “All I know how to do is dance, and who’s going to hire me for choreography gigs? I’ll be nothing,nadie.And then she’ll be right.”
Her sobs strengthened, and it was difficult to follow her rapid-fire verbal spiral into sadness, but he latched on to the last thing she said. “Who will be right?”
He almost missed it, so light were the words. But he was fully awake now, and listening closely.
“My mother.”
Ah. He chewed that over, soothing her with soft caresses. When it her sobs quieted, he asked, “What will she be right about?”
She hiccupped. “That I’m a failure.”
“How, exactly?”
“Nothing I’ve done has ever been good enough for her. Most of the time, she couldn’t even be bothered to come to my shows. And when I got into Lennox, she acted like it was no big deal. A waste of time and money. Why not get a real job, or a real degree?”
Located near Lincoln Center in Manhattan, Lennox was the most prestigious college for the performing arts in the country, and notoriously difficult to get accepted into. He’d thought about going there himself, but with Alex’s help, he was already pro, and he hadn’t wanted to get off-track.
“Did you go?”
“Of course not.” She rubbed at her nose. “Gina did. I told her I didn’t get in. Instead, I worked, and saved, and waited for Gina to finish so we could move out here. But then myabueladied, and I couldn’t stay in that apartment another second. So, I came out here on my own, and that was a fucking disaster, too.”
Everything she said was new to him. He’d known she was from New York, like he was, and he’d known she moved to Los Angeles with Gina and secured a gig onEverybody Dance Now.But he suspected there were holes in the story, and he was going to hear them now. Since she was finally spilling her secrets, he did his best to be a good listener, to let her know she could trust him with them, that he wouldn’t judge her.
“What happened?”
She shook her head and buried her wet face in his neck. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay.” There would be time later. He didn’t need all her secrets now. But there was one thing he had to try to make clear to her. “You’re not a failure, Natasha.”
